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Review of "Think to New Worlds" by Joshua Blu Buhs

5/8/2024

Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers
Jason Blu Buhs | University of Chicago Press | June 2024 | 384 pages | ISBN: 978-0226831480

Charles Fort (1874–1932) is probably more famous as an idea than as a man. His grave sits not far from where I write this now, at the Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. It’s not much to look at—a curving stone bearing his name above a monogram of a blackletter “F” wreathed in laurels, all slowly dissolving beneath a coating of lichens. It’s a stone’s throw from the much more elaborate marker of Pres. Chester Alan Arthur, but what both men share in common is a paucity of visitors who come to pay homage to their mortal remains. By contrast, you can’t visit social media or read a book about the paranormal or earth mysteries without running into someone calling up the shade of America’s greatest crank to conjure the anomalous and clothe conspiracies in the garb of prewar authority. And almost none of them could tell you anything about his life. Fort is a man who became a symbol, representing a certain stubborn resistance to authority, to science, and to the notion of reality as mechanical, material, and knowable.

6 Comments

Graham Hancock and Mike Tyson Rave About Psychedelics and the Supernatural

7/14/2022

2 Comments

Our impoverished intellectual era has provided many moments of unintentional comedy. But few moments truly make one feel like there are simply no standards left like seeing this video of Graham Hancock having a discussion with Mike Tyson about psychedelic drugs while the host calls both the crackpot author and the violent boxer “legends” and the table before them displays bags of cannabis gummies shaped like the ear Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield. It’s absurd. It’s grotesque. Hancock even claims that the gummies are the result of a supernatural release of “creative potential” on Tyson’s part. Hancock also describes seeing two flying saucers and a Grey alien while high on psychedelics, and he claims to regret refusing the alien’s offer to abduct him.

2 Comments

Whitley Strieber Claims Visit to Parallel World, Begs "The Energy" to Let Him Return

5/7/2020

27 Comments

I feel like it says something about Graham Hancock that he has devoted a growing percentage of the guest articles on his website to UFO and ancient astronaut claims, even though he himself purports not to believe in the ancient astronaut theory. How much of that is the case is debatable, since his rejection of ancient astronautics in Magicians of the Gods contrasts rather heavily with his frequent appearances on Ancient Aliens and the ancient astronaut book he coauthored, The Mars Mystery. At any rate, it was rather surprising to see Hancock follow up publishing a guest article about Hopi ancient astronaut encounters with one from infamous UFO abductee Whitley Strieber excerpting his new book about ancient “visitors” and their “human allies.”

27 Comments

Charles Fort's "Book of the Damned" Turns 100

11/14/2019

2 Comments

My deadline for finalizing my Legends of the Pyramids manuscript is December 1, which means that I need to devote extra time over the next two weeks to getting my submission put together. So, today, I will only briefly remark that this year is the centennial of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned, a seminal work in the world of the bizarre, fringe, and pseudoscientific. In honor of the anniversary, Micah Hanks published an article this week celebrating Fort’s unreadable, gibberish style (“oddly poetic”) and describing “one of my absolute favorite passages” (emphasis in original) in Fort’s book. That he has a favorite passage in Fort, and that it is a list of red rains culminating in a bizarre non sequitur about a “super-dragon” crashing into a comet and bleeding all over the Earth probably says more about Hanks than it does about Fort.

2 Comments

The 1643 Murder of Newbury's Surfing "Witch"

10/31/2019

10 Comments

In honor of Halloween, I present the text of a misogynistic 1643 pamphlet about the murder of a witch in Newbury, England. This particular case involves a group of men freaking out that a woman was surfing (!) and killing her for it. The original spelling and punctuation is given here, as reprinted in Walter Money's First and Second Battles of Newbury etc., second ed. (1884).

10 Comments

A French Missionary's Eighteenth Century Account of Mokèlé-mbèmbé

6/13/2018

7 Comments

Today I am working on my All About History article on Hitler’s wonder weapons, so you are getting a rerun. This past week, Scientific American published a piece by Darren Naish exploring the origins of Mokèlé-mbèmbé, the legendary Congolese monster supposed by many cryptozoologists to be a living dinosaur. Nash correctly attributes the development of the myth to the dinosaur mania of the early twentieth century, the same impulse that led Conan Doyle to write The Lost World around the same time. But neither in the blog nor in his book Hunting Monsters (according to a text search in Google Books—I haven’t read the book) does Naish discuss the story that has long served as “evidence” that the monster predated twentieth century adventurers’ stories. Therefore, I present my discussion of the eighteenth century French account of Mokèlé-mbèmbé’s monstrous footprints. I originally wrote this in 2012, and the text below is the revised and expanded version presented in my 2013 book Faking History.

7 Comments

Creationist Promotes Prop from Old TV Show as Proof of Pterosaurs in the Old West

5/10/2018

48 Comments

Some of you might have seen that Graham Hancock posted on his social media accounts yesterday that he is currently writing his new book on prehistoric America and is deep into creating alternative explanations for the alignments of the Newark Earthworks in Ohio. This amused me because I am also writing about the Newark Earthworks for my own book this week, though in a very different way. Hancock is analyzing the mounds themselves for secret alignments and their connections to astrology and Atlantis, while I have been investigating the people who invented these claims, many of whom never actually studied the mounds in person or conducted any scientific surveys. Hancock is particularly interested in the Great Serpent Mound, which has quite the colorful history of attracting misinformed views, including the bizarre claim that it is a duplicate of a mound at Loch Nell in Scotland, which is actually a glacial deposit and not a serpent-shaped mound. That claim had a good run of 140 years, and none of the early advocates of the claim, including famed archaeologist Frederick Ward Putnam, had actually visited both sites.

48 Comments

New Book Claims to Be Rediscovered Ancient Text Written by Egyptian God Thoth. It Is Actually "Channeled" New Age Mysticism

1/13/2017

19 Comments

So, this one was a big “No” from me. I started to take a look at an upcoming release from Bear & Company called The Tablets of Light: The Teachings of Thoth on Unity Consciousness (2017), which appears under the byline of Danielle Rama Hoffman and the copyright of Danielle Lynn Hoffman, who are presumably the same person. I did not make it very far. Mostly I wanted to give up when the acknowledgements thanked the Egyptian god Thoth, to whom the book is pompously dedicated, and to “the Council of Light, Isis, Sanat Kumara, Venus Beings of Light, and all the Light Beings I have the blessing of multidimensionally communicating with.” But I did give it a go into the first chapter. It was a mistake. I had expected at least a passing familiarity with Egyptian, Greek, and Hermetic sources; I received rambling New Age mumbo-jumbo.

19 Comments

Monday Odds and Ends: Recycled News, Jacques Vallee in Argentina, and Arabic Treasure Hunting Guides

9/19/2016

13 Comments

Here we go again! A geologist claims that he has discovered definitive proof that Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene were buried in Jerusalem’s Talpiot Tomb with their son Judah—and the geologist isn’t even Scott Wolter! Dr. Aryeh Shimron says that chemical tests done on the so-called James Ossuary, the one inscribed with the phrase “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” prove that the ossuary was originally deposited in the Talpiot Tomb. The bigger question is this: Why is this news now? Shimron made his claims in the spring of 2015, but Britain’s Sun newspaper decided to write about them now, for no discernible reason.

13 Comments

Why Do Some People Think There Was a Lost "Black" Pyramid on the Giza Plateau?

9/14/2016

11 Comments

In 1737 and 1738, Danish naval captain Frederic Louis Norden traveled through Egypt and Nubia to make a report of them for King Christian VI, though neither man would live to see the publication of the resulting volume, Voyage d’Egypte et de Nubie, in 1755. The volume is famous for depicting the Sphinx for the first time without its nose and in a realistic style. But for fringe historians the volume is also interesting because of the mistakes Norden made, which of course they take to be something else

11 Comments

<<Previous

Review of "Think to New Worlds" by Joshua Blu Buhs

Graham Hancock and Mike Tyson Rave About Psychedelics and the Supernatural

Whitley Strieber Claims Visit to Parallel World, Begs "The Energy" to Let Him Return

Charles Fort's "Book of the Damned" Turns 100

The 1643 Murder of Newbury's Surfing "Witch"

A French Missionary's Eighteenth Century Account of Mokèlé-mbèmbé

Creationist Promotes Prop from Old TV Show as Proof of Pterosaurs in the Old West

New Book Claims to Be Rediscovered Ancient Text Written by Egyptian God Thoth. It Is Actually "Channeled" New Age Mysticism

Monday Odds and Ends: Recycled News, Jacques Vallee in Argentina, and Arabic Treasure Hunting Guides

Why Do Some People Think There Was a Lost "Black" Pyramid on the Giza Plateau?

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